Reviews
Adam Sweeting
We know any old nonsense goes on Valentine's Day, but as it dragged itself towards the end of its allotted hour, Jo Brand's search for the meaning of kissing was being drowned out by a cacophonous din of barrels being scraped. Considering Brand's implacable hostility towards seeing people kissing - "There's far too much kissing going on these days, especially in public" was her opening salvo - it's amazing she wanted to make the programme at all. In the end, though, it was her neurotic eagerness to avoid kissing or being kissed that gave the film what little fascination it managed to generate Read more ...
fisun.guner
Daniel McGowan is a convicted terrorist. As a former leading member of the Earth Liberation Front, listed as the FBI’s number one domestic terrorist organisation, the thirtysomething New Yorker with a gentle, rather guileless demeanour was convicted in 2007 on multiple counts of arson and conspiracy. No one was killed during these attacks and no one has ever been killed or physically injured in the course of any ELF action. But that’s not to say we were meant to feel entirely sympathetic to McGowan or, indeed, to the ELF .This excellent film, by Sam Cullman and Marshall Curry, was balanced, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich has spent a decade following the everyday lives of Indonesia’s Sjamsuddin family, a working-class clan with their roots in the countryside whose working lives have taken them into the hubbub of the country’s capital Jakarta. Position Among the Stars is the final work of a trilogy, its immediate subject the importance of granddaughter Tari going to college to receive the further education that will give her new opportunities. But, as much as anything else, Retel Helmrich (himself of part-Indonesian descent) captures the sheer variety and vitality of the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Yayoi Kusama, one of Japan’s best-known living artists, has spent the past 34 years as a voluntary in-patient in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Now 82, she was part of the New York avant-garde art scene of the Sixties, making work that anticipated both Andy Warhol’s repeated-motif “Cow Wallpaper” and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures. Her nude happenings included orgies and naked gay weddings, over which she presided fully clothed like a psychedelic high priestess.Showing just how adept she was at garnering publicity, in 1968 Kusama wrote and distributed Open Letter to My Hero Richard M Read more ...
David Benedict
When blithe Susanna and not the expected Cherubino emerges from hiding before the astonished Countess and enraged Count, the latter instantly back-pedals on the fury he has been heaping upon his seemingly faithless wife. She rounds on him: “Crudele, più quella non sono!” (“Traitor, I am no longer her”) and everything suddenly stops. It's a tiny two-beat rest that usually goes for nothing except the signal for a key change, but here the moment is charged with drama. The Count shoots apologetic looks to cover his shame and the Countess painfully registers her lost trust. That vivid attention to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You couldn't imagine a less likely acrobat than avuncular American Richard Goode. But when it comes to the piano, there's no mistaking it. A nippy little tumbler he undoubtedly is. Today we saw his fingers bounce about the keyboard like a troupe of prepubescent Romanian gymnasts. The sleepy Sunday concert that many had clearly hoped for was not going to be the narrative of this kinetic performance.The first work on the programme might have lulled some into a false sense of security. Schumann's Kinderszenen called mostly on Goode's avuncularism. He responded with some tender pianistic sketches Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Famously, at its Venice premiere in 1853, La traviata had trouble with the censor, not only over the salty innuendos of the plot, but over the simple fact that it was set in the present day and in contemporary costume. A rule like that would finish off most updated modern stagings (and no bad thing at that). But David McVicar’s now two-year-old staging of Verdi’s early verismo masterpiece in Cardiff's Wales Millennium Centre wouldn’t be one of them.With a few tweaks, and maybe a mild slippage forward of a decade or two, it takes the work’s demi-monde as it finds it, bustles and white ties and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
For all its comic fantasy and lilting tunes, there’s nothing pastel-coloured about Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Deaths are frequent and bloody, humour is macabre, and emotions run high – being late to the pub is cause enough for violence and conspiracy theories. It’s a world of sliding screens, where a smile always threatens to become a leer, a kiss a murder. Who better (who else?) to inhabit this operatic fantasy-land than Richard Jones, a director who relishes the elision and collision of kitsch and the grotesque. His steel-capped whimsy here hits its mark with deadly and delicious Read more ...
joe.muggs
Justice – pronounce it “Joosteece”, for they are as French as they come – deconstruct the opposition between style and substance. Everything about them is preposterous, from the hipster facial hair via the rock-pig antics in their A Cross The Universe tour “documentary” DVD to the way that almost the entirety of their musical palette is cribbed from their countrymen and close associates Daft Punk. They are masters of the big, empty gesture taken to ridiculous extremes, of blustering noise and gut-punching beats made strangely friendly, of the reduction of both rock and rave music to a Read more ...
Sam Marlowe
One look at Tom Scutt’s meticulous design for Jeremy Herrin’s production of this savage Alan Ayckbourn comedy, and you know you’re in the 1970s. Wood veneer and faux leather lend a shiny, wipe-clean surface to this desolately unhappy home, where everything is in shades of brown: beige carpets, beige walls, beige lives. When laughter comes, it is often choking; Herrin’s direction is so mercilessly precise, and the acting so acute, that though it is undeniably funny, the play leaves you bruised and punchdrunk.It begins, with quiet, cruel deliberation, with two women in that ugly, expensive room Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Immediately before Barry Adamson started his performance, the audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall was treated to a few fragrant verses about arts cinemas and the homeless from Yorkshire poet Geoffrey Allerton. The keen-eyed soon twigged that Allerton was actually a fictional construct, part-Simon Armitage, part-Freddie Trueman, created by comedian Simon Day. A beautifully idiosyncratic prelude to a pretty idiosyncratic headline set.When Barry Adamson stalked on stage, posing at the top of a short staircase on a white Austin Powers shagpile, it would have been easy to mistake him for Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In Susan Hill’s 1982 novel The Woman in Black, the protagonist Arthur Kipps concludes his narration with petulant certainty: “They asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.” With this film adaptation (an exercise in hair-raising horror, in contrast to the book’s chill grandeur and the play’s postmodern whimsy), director James Watkins clearly feels there is more to say and, though he often says it with style, it’s a film that sometimes lacks guts. As its daring do-gooder, it features boy wonder Daniel Radcliffe, now a man and here a father who, in his continued battle against evil, is hardly Read more ...